Ranjani Srinivasan, a doctoral student who had signed letters in support of Palestine and was arrested at Columbia University last spring, flew to Canada after immigration authorities revoked her student visa; Leqaa Kordia, a participant in the protests at Columbia, was arrested in Newark, New Jersey; Rasha Alawieh, a doctor whose visa is valid through mid-2027, was deported after returning from visiting relatives in Lebanon; and Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holder and former graduate student at Columbia who served as a spokesperson for pro-Palestine protesters during campus demonstrations last spring, was arrested by plainclothes officers who drove away with him in an unmarked car.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 The White House’s X account posted a photo of Khalil, who has since been moved to a detention center in Louisiana, with the words SHALOM MAHMOUD superimposed on it; the Department of Homeland Security accused him of leading activities “aligned to Hamas;” and the White House press secretary said that Khalil’s arrest and planned deportation was justified under the Cold War–era Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which effectively barred Communists and Holocaust survivors from entering the United States and was introduced by a Pennsylvania congressman who once gifted President Roosevelt a letter opener fashioned from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier, and by a Nevada senator who described concentration camp survivors as “displeased persons rather than displaced persons.”11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 “We’re going,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “to keep doing it.”19 President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was also used during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II to expel, detain, and restrict people based on their ancestry, to deport more than two hundred Venezuelan men, alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang, to a mega-prison in El Salvador in which inmates are prohibited from going outside, having visitors, or participating in educational programs; the planes had already left U.S. territory by the time a federal judge blocked the men’s deportation.20 21 22 23 24 25 “Oopsie…,” wrote El Salvador’s president on social media. “Too late.”26 Rubio announced the expulsion of South Africa’s ambassador from the United States for “hating” Trump, and a Colombian diplomat was hit by a stray bullet while in Sao Paolo, Brazil.27 28 The federally funded news organization Voice of America, which the White House has characterized as “radical,” was shut down by Trump, who earlier this month claimed he had “stopped all government censorship” and “brought back free speech to America.”29 30 31 “I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that,” said Trump regarding his claim that he would end the Russia–Ukraine war in twenty-four hours.32
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán promised to rid the country of foreign interests working on behalf of the “liberal American empire” while thousands of anti-Orbán protesters organized in Budapest, and dueling protests between supporters and adversaries of South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol took place in Seoul.33 34 Serbian officials denied using a military-grade sonic weapon that can rupture ear drums in the course of dispersing peaceful anti-government protesters during a moment of silence for the fifteen people killed by the collapse of a concrete canopy in November.35 Israeli reservists filmed themselves reading the Book of Esther while firing toward Gaza.36 An attorney at the Department of Justice said she was fired because she refused to restore Mel Gibson’s right to own a gun, a private security guard was fired after leaving his gun in an elementary school bathroom in Twin Falls, Idaho, and a Swiss politician was fined more than seven thousand dollars for giving his godchildren water guns as gifts, which authorities said could be mistaken for real firearms.37 38 39 The organizers of a marathon in Taiwan apologized after handing out prizes in the shape of a machine gun currently in use by China’s ground forces.40
The governor of Rajasthan, India, suggested that rapists be castrated, as a deterrent to the committing of such crimes; a bill requiring child sex offenders to undergo chemical castration before release passed in the Oklahoma House of Representatives; and an embalmer castrated the corpse of a convicted sex offender in Texas.41 42 43 A man in a New Jersey airport tried to smuggle a turtle through security in the crotch of his pants.44 “As best as we could tell,” said the TSA’s federal security director for New Jersey, “the turtle was not harmed.”45 A man in Peru survived ninety-five days adrift at sea by eating turtles, birds, and cockroaches.46 Researchers at the University of Osaka turned cockroaches into cyborgs, and it was reported that two Japanese tourists were detained for two weeks and then deported from China after one of them exposed his butt in a photograph on the Great Wall.47 48 “I’m a bit mooned out at the moment,” said a researcher after he discovered that there are 128 “potato-shaped” moonlets orbiting Saturn.49 50 —Megan Evershed
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